Immigration and Gas Prices

My mailbox is being flooded with mail concerning gas prices and illegal immigrants. To boycott oil companies or not; to provide amnesty to illegal immigrants or not, etc.

Since I have become jaded to the various solutions proposed by the Republicans, Democrats, Sierra Club, ACLU, etc. I have elected to solve the problems as they affect me. It solves both my gas and illegal immigrant problems.

I have hired illegal immigrants to push my car. They're plentiful and cheaper than buying gas. Then pay them in pesos so they have to go home to spend it.

Want a hemmorhoid?

I've seen alot of crazy shit, but this gem deserves honorable mention. I dont know what it's actually called, but iCrap would have been a great name. How spends so much time on the shitter that they need a soundtrack? What do you listen to on the pot anyway? Ive heard of niche marketing, but this takes it to a level i never though possible... Hey, let's make a product for people that are so glued to thier iPod, they cant even take a dump without it, AND, we'll enhance the dumping experience by adding a melody to the aroma. Retarded.

Amen to that brother!

Imus isn’t the real bad guy

Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.

By JASON WHITLOCK - Columnist

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.
You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.
Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.
The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.
I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.
But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?
I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.
No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

To reach Jason Whitlock, call (816) 234-4869 or send e-mail to jwhitlock@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com

Wanna go to London? Google can get you there!

This is pretty funny. You gotta hand it to the Google folks (this is not a gratuitous reference to the story below) for having a sense of humor.

Go to www.google.com and follow these steps.

1. click on "maps"
2. click on "get directions"
3. type "New York" in the first box (the "from" box)
4. type "London" in the second box (the "to" box)
5. click on "get directions"
6. scroll down to step #23

You gotta hand it to him....

A crocodile at a zoo in the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung holds the forearm of a zoo veterinarian in between its teeth, April 11, 2007. The crocodile bit off the arm of the zoo veterinarian treating it, an official reported.

Follow up: (AKA, Holy Shit! Modern surgical techniques rock)

Taiwanese zookeeper Chang Po-yu waves from his hospital bed, Thursday, April 12, 2007, in Kaohsiung, 350 kilometers (217 miles) south west of Taipei, Taiwan. Surgeons reattached Chang's forearm Thursday after a 200-kilogram (440-pound) Nile crocodile chomped it off and colleagues recovered the limb from the reptile's mouth. The forearm was reattached following seven hours of surgery. The Liberty Times newspaper said Chang failed to notice that the crocodile was not fully anesthetized when he stuck his arm through an iron rail to medicate it. (AP Photo/Steve Chen)

Leather rules...

PETA be damned. They are a ridiculous group anyway. I mean c'mon, who WANTS to torture an animal, or be willfully unkind, or be the one who rips young whatever from their mother. Not me. I don't need Chrissy Hind to tell me to have a conscience. There are some sick fucks out there, but for the most part, I think humanity likes animals and appreciates animals as companions and when necessity calls, understands that they are a valuable source of protein. If that sounds insensitive, so be it. Meat is murder? Yeah right. Meat is delicious. The flip side is the absolute brutality of the Korean dog markets and the annual Japanese dolphin slaughter. Of course, that's based on my perception and culture, and a Hindu would be equally repulsed by my love of beef. I guess the method of the slaughter is what really gets me. If you have the stomach for it, check out YouTube and search for Korea Dog Market and Japan Dolphin Slaughter. By my Western, beef eating standards, it is nothing short of shocking and horrific.

Anyway, the only thing better than a delicious side of beef, (holy crap, that was a bad segway) is the fantastic wrapper it comes in. Well, maybe not. A porterhouse steak is pretty freaking tough to beat, especially when I'm tending the grill.

Okay, so back to leather. I have been looking for a super cool leather bag for some time and looking through the offerings of all the usual suspects... Gurkha, Coach, Mullholland Bros., Hartman, Tumi, etc. Quite by accident, I found on eBay, a guy who's family has been in the business of handmade leather goods of uncompromising quality for generations as far as I can tell. These bags have more character than ANYTHING I have ever seen. Long story short, my bag is on order and I can wait to get it!

The Bag is made by a father/son team out of Austin, Texas that have a small shop called Saddleback Leather Company. (http://www.saddlebackleather.com/) Their work, appears to be top notch. I'll verify this once the bag arrives. Check out the website.

Golden-Doodle!

It seems my wife may have found a dog we can actually own! Behold, the Golden-Doodle.... (and behold my first image post). The GD is half Golden Retriever, half Poodle. Here's the throry, you mix a golden and a poodle and you get the benefits of a golden's temperment, and the hypoallergenic qualities of a poodle. Well, apparently it works. My wife and kids went and visited one of these cross breds today and noone reacted with any allergic sumptoms. Awesome.

To dog or not to dog...

Once again the question has come up, do we get a dog or do we not get a dog? My kids would love one, despite thier allergies. I'd love one, because I've grown up with dogs and enjoy thier companionship, my wife would like one but wants an outside dog. Given that dogs are pack animals and den animals, we disagree on this very important point. I dont want to relegate a dog the backyard. We started looking at poodle hybrids like schnoodles (schnauzer/poodle). More later...

Tis the season...

Holy crap. It's spring and everything is bloom. especially my allergies. This weekend is particularly rough. My immune system is so jacked up from fighting the allergies, i woke up with a freakin' cold sore under my nose. Very attacative. I may have to start getting shots again. Oh well. It is what it is. It's one of the not so great aspect of living in this area...

What a day..

I thought my furniture moving days were over in college. I had a job as a mover in San Diego when I moved there to pretend to go to SD State. My intention was to spend 2 years at city, and transfer into state. The beach, jet skiing, Tijuana and a pile of friends totally jacked that plan up. Anyway, the worst moving day ever was moving an upright piano into a 2nd story condo. Immediately after that move, i think the company folded because I never got another check.So, back to today... We spent the day rearranging 3 bedrooms in our house. We ditched the guest room, split Conner and Hunter into Their own rooms, and moved Brandon and Keenan into what used the be the guest room. And ridiculously enough, the second largest room in the house. The older boys are at a place where they need their own space and B & K don't mind sharing. Plus, I'm building them a sweet loft/clubhouse/hideout in their room. maybe I'll post a pic when it's done. Kier was amazing. She schlepped more shit than a Sherpa today, had a great attitude all day long and never complained once. Which is more than I can say for myself... At least on the complaining part...

What is kolbasz you ask?

Kolbasz is the Hungarian word for sausage, not unlike kielbasa in poland, except way better and has a ton more flavor. My family has been making Hungarian sausage for as long as I can remember and probabaly more generations back that I could even figure out.

It's something I learned from participating in the process ever since I was about 12 years old. My family would get together every winter and make massive batches of smoked Hungarian sausage although my average batch now is 20-30 lbs due to the limited size of my smoke house. People would literally put thier "orders" in a year in advance to get a link or two of our paprika and garlic laden masterpiece. It seriously has a cult following among our friends and family. That gives me a great sense of pride.

You'd be surprised how fast a few hundred lbs. of sausage can vanish. Anyway, I think i'm at the very least, the 5th generation sausage maker in my family. My sons (i have 4) have shown an interest in working the crank on the stuffer and loading the smoke house so it's safe to assume that the tradiditon will live one.

I just finished the last batch of the winter a couple weeks ago (you can only make it when its COLD outside, otherwise the meat will spoil before it has time to cold smoke and cure properly). It's all old school, old world technique and the stuff will last indefinitley (like jerkey) without preservatives, fillers, additives, chemical preservatives or any other stuff you wouldnt wan't to be eating anyway...

All bets are off!

I just had a thought. Given my sometimes (most of the time) wacky sency of humor, there's alot of stuff I cant really share with some friends and coworkers. You know, the whole HR thing. Well, here's a perfect place to dump some of my favorite stuff, in a totally neutral "green zone". That's pretty cool.

You never forget your first time...

Okay, so this is my first post. I guess that makes me a blogger now. woohoo. It is kinda cool to have a little space on the web to dump my thoughts, random links, goings on, etc. I'm not sure how often I'll update this, but i anticipate that this wont be the first and last time.